22 August Lunch Hour Talk
Speaker: Helen Topor
Topic: Neither King nor Saint
Award-winning author Helen Topor brings to light the obstacles delaying her postwar migrant family’s assimilation into the wider Australian community. Stories such as hers are seldom told or heard. Most published migrant stories are celebratory, predictable and nostalgic. Helen’s book, however, is quite different.
Neither King nor Saint won a MARION ACT Notable Book Award for nonfiction in 2023. In her citation, judge Jessica Friedmann wrote: “In this evocative memoir, Helen Topor describes her father’s wartime abduction by Germany into forced labour as a Polish ‘Untermensch’, its effect on her parents’ marriage and the family’s long years in Australian migrant camps. Neither King nor Saint is an insightful, unsentimental, and beautifully written contribution to the literature of displacement.”
In her review of Neither King nor Saint, Dr Kasia Kwapisz Williams, Deputy Director, Centre for European Studies, ANU, wrote: “Helen Topor’s book … provides fascinating insights into the culture and climate of post-war Australia, the failure of Australia’s settlement policies and the consequence these have had, not only on migrants but also on their descendants. Most importantly, she brings into focus histories Australians were not supposed to remember or know, even though these shaped their lives and their country. Australian readers need this book to understand their own country.”
Helen will talk about the three questions that prompted her to write the book, her process and the responses she’s received from readers.
Helen Topor lives in Ngunnawal/Canberra and is a Voluntary Guide at the NGA. Author of Discovering Vermeer, Outdoor Games for Today’s Children and Neither King nor Saint, Helen is writing a novel centred on Vermeer’s wrongly maligned wife and mother-in-law. She is also ghostwriting a sexual abuse victim’s memoir. When she isn’t writing, she edits PhD theses, fiction and nonfiction books.
Where – The meeting room at the Customs House Library, at Circular Quay.
When – The talk will begin at 12.15, The room is open from 11.30 for tea/coffee/sandwiches.
Entry – $20 JSNWL members $25 non-members
PLEASE BOOK BY NOON Monday 19 August 2024
Phone the library on (02) 9571 5359 or email .au
